No Full Stops in India by Mark Tully

Author:Mark Tully
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141927756
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

6

COMMUNISM IN CALCUTTA

Joseph Stalin glowered down on the Soviet fraternal delegation attending the thirteenth party conference of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). This must have seemed a particularly unfraternal gesture to the comrades from Moscow. Their Indian hosts knew full well that the Soviets had come with the hope of selling perestroika; they also knew, of course, that Stalin was anathema to Mikhail Gorbachev. The host party did not intend a deliberate slight, but it was determined to send a clear message to its own cadres that, in India at least, Stalin had not been dethroned.

At first sight it might seem strange that a party which has often been described – wrongly in my view – as an Asian version of Eurocommunism should be so concerned about preserving the reputation of the dictatorial Stalin. But communism in India owes a great debt to Stalin. He may have been a dictator, but at least he was a realist when it came to India. Immediately after independence, the Indian communist movement identified the new ruling class as bourgeois compradors – agents of a foreign power – allied with imperialists. They were reckoned to be too enfeebled to stand up to an insurgency, and so the communists committed themselves to installing their system of government by force. But the compradors and the imperialists proved less feeble than the communists had thought, and the people of India did not rally to the red flag. Eventually Stalin intervened. In 1950 he summoned a delegation of three leading Indian communists to Moscow. There he questioned them about their strategy and the help they required from him. The Indian communists displayed a less than convincing mastery of the art of war and were particularly ignorant about the arms required for an insurrection and the difficulties of transporting them. Stalin pointed out that the centre of their insurgency, in the Telengana region in southern India, was too far away from any port for him to be able to help very much. He advised his Indian comrades to drop the insurgency and prepare for the elections due shortly.

The delegates took Stalin's advice, and since then the main elements in the Indian communist movement have stuck to the democratic path. In 1957, the world's first democratically elected communist government came to power in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala, was the venue of that thirteenth party conference.

Once communism had become an Indian movement, not a Soviet one, it was inevitable that the communists would follow the fissiparous pattern of Indian politics. They are continually in flux, with politicians walking out of one party sometimes to join another, sometimes to form a splinter group which they claim is the genuine party, and sometimes to return eventually to the fold from which they strayed.

The communists’ first split was based on serious ideological differences: it was not just the result of frustrated personal ambitions, as happens often in India. What can only be described as the right

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